How do you handle project management with Jira Plans?

[Gille_ Melanie]

Hi,

we are currently using Jira Plans to manage multiple projects. Within these projects, several teams are involved, each contributing their part. As the number of parallel initiatives has increased, it has become more and more challenging to maintain a clear and realistic planning overview.

At the moment, we structure our projects using Initiatives as the overarching topics, with Epics, Tasks, and Subtasks representing phases and workloads. While this setup works well for organizing work on a detailed level, it falls short when it comes to understanding the overall capacity and availability of the involved teams.

In particular, we are facing difficulties in visualizing how heavily individual teams are already allocated across multiple parallel projects. Some teams are becoming increasingly overloaded, and this is not sufficiently visible in our current setup. Additionally, factors such as vacations, business trips, workshops, or other absences are not transparently reflected in our planning, which further reduces planning reliability.

What we are looking for is a way to better understand and visualize:

• the actual participation of each team across multiple projects
• their overall workload and capacity
• and their real availability, including planned absences

Therefore, I would be very interested to understand how your project management process addresses these challenges. In particular:

• How do you handle cross-team capacity planning?
• How do you incorporate availability (e.g. vacations, workshops) into your planning?
• And how do you ensure transparency across multiple parallel projects?

Best regards